


Sense of Self

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:22:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are stars reflected in the water the night Ororo Munroe sees the dead man floating in the pool.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sense of Self

There are stars reflected in the water the night Ororo Munroe sees the dead man floating in the pool. It has already been a day she would prefer to forget. They have won, yes, and survived, but victory is on no one’s mind. Logan lies comatose in the infirmary, his wounds refusing to heal. The Professor’s body is there too, his mind lost, wandering the astral plane in search of an anchor. Jean hopes to save both of them through her talents. Scott paces the corridors, a watchdog for the children who, most likely, are telling hushed stories in the dorms about the X-Men’s great victory. Ororo has nothing to contribute but hope, and nothing to seek but solace. Gently, Jean had told her to get some sleep. And she’s trying.

The balcony has always been hers, even when another mutant with the power of flight had walked the halls of the mansion. They had rarely talked – she had taken him for a quiet, taciturn man then, not knowing the arguments that kept Jean awake, and made Scott take to the countryside for hours on his motorcycle. Magneto’s world had been the tunnels under the mansion: warm and dark and _safe_. She could understand why the metal was reassuring to him, but it made her claustrophobic. Ororo needed air. She needed to smell the rain on the breeze.

She needs rain now. Her body calls out for it, for a cleansing. There is too much blood on her hands to be washed away by sleep alone. She stands on the balcony and wrenches leather gloves away from bruised knuckles. The first increase of moisture in the air comes as she stares at her own hand, where the Senator had gripped her tightly before disintegrating in front of her eyes. Some part of her feels that she should approve of his death, or at least the manner of it: a return to nature, to the waters that give everything life. But she wonders if he was married, if he had children who will now have nothing to bury, no way to pour their grief into something concrete. The raindrops hit her face in place of tears.

Toad. A man she had never met; his life ended in a moment of fury. Where had that anger come from? Ororo winces as she squeezes out of her uniform jacket. The heat and the sweat seem to have welded the leather to her skin, even through the light shirt she has been wearing underneath. There’s no blood, but she can feel the aches of torn muscles and bruised skin on her back. She should take a hot shower, clean herself up, ease the pain. But there’s something about that pain that can be reassuring. It is hers, she has earned it, and, now, she owns it.

The rain falls on the balcony: a light spring shower rather than the dark, swirling storm she sees in her thoughts. She washes her mind with it, leaning on the stone barrier and breathing in the night.

He is a ghost, at first, and not in the supernatural sense: a trick of the light, of the waves in the pool, or of her own mind. Just an indistinct, pale shape that might be a man, seen by the right person from the right angle – by a person consumed by memories and guilt. But Ororo wipes the rainwater from her eyes, and looks again, and _knows_.

The pool isn’t heated in the summer and, after a less-than-scorching day, the water is a shock to her stiff, protesting body. It seeps into her clothes immediately, making the cotton shirt cling to her breasts, her boots filling up like ballast, dragging her down. But there’s no danger of her drowning. She only has to hold her breath long enough to see.

He is like nothing human she has seen before: gelatinous, inert, it seems as though he is a barely sentient creature, doomed to drift forever in the depths of a distant ocean. Perhaps it is only by some accident of chance that he has come to resemble a man. There is no hair, no muscle tone, nor even any bones that she can see. Gashes in his lower back that might be gills flutter a little as she swims in a wide circle around him. She’s afraid to reach out and touch him, in case her fingers pass right through. But she does, tentatively, a child fascinated and repelled by a jellyfish, and she meets resistance.

His eyes open: staring at her as if blue ink has been splashed across a lens. Ororo grabs onto him, and flies.

***

They both gasp for breath by the pool. Ororo lets go of him as soon as they are on dry land, rolling away, needing to wipe _him_ from her hands, and hoping that she has done him no harm. She expects him to be a person again, out of the water, to be recognizable, to talk to her again. But he just lies there: face up, not breathing. Ororo crawls over to him. “Come on…” she says, urging herself on more than anything. She has no idea whether he can even hear her. What is she missing?

It comes to her in a thought that makes her realize how tired she must be: _gills_. He’s like a fish that simply cannot survive on land, because he doesn’t have the correct equipment, anymore than Ororo can breathe underwater without scuba gear. She could simply push him back into the pool, but he had done it before – he had been able to breathe and speak in the infirmary. But how did the change work?

She stares into unfocused eyes, and grips what might be a hand but feels more like jelly than skin. “Come on, you did it before. You remember how. Breathe. Be a man again. Breathe.”

There’s a strangled noise in his throat, and the washed-out blue of his eyes seems to coalesce into something brighter. He pulls away from her grip, rolling over to a crouched position as he vomits up pool water. It only takes seconds for his shape to change, for the gills to disappear into the skin of his back. Ororo smiles, relieved. “Senator?”

He doesn’t look at her, and maybe breathing is too much of an effort for him to talk. She gets to her feet, boots squelching under her weight. Could someone really dissolve entirely into water, and then reform into a human being? She’s seen stranger things in her time at the school, but a part of her wonders where memories and personality – where the _soul_ – could go amid those molecules.

Ororo crouches down and touches his shoulder. His skin is slippery like olive oil, hair pale and translucent, as if she could break it apart like a finger through gel. “Are you all right?” she asks softly.

He’s shivering. She can tell that much without him having to say a word.

“I’ll be back,” she says, and hurries towards the nearest door to the mansion. She could have simply taken him with her, but in the circumstances perhaps it’s better that he stay by the water. She doesn’t want him to drown in oxygen.

The laundry room is faster to access than any of the bedrooms, and something in her wants to avoid Scott’s patrols. She finds sweatpants and a Xavier Institute-branded hoodie in a drier. Maybe Scott’s or Bobby Drake’s. It feels a little pointless, clothing a man who could soak through any fabric in a few seconds. She can still feel the memory of his hand shattering in hers, the way she could feel his death. One moment there had been blood pulsing in his veins; the next, only water.

He looks human when she goes back to him, feet dangling in the pool, body bent over so that his elbows rest on his thighs. It’s a posture she finds strange until she remembers that he’s naked among strangers.

“Senator?”

“Robert,” he says in a whisper, and looks at her with eyes she recognizes from the first time she saw him – standing behind a microphone, explaining the need for the Mutant Registration Bill. She had never been interested in politics before.

But she crouches down beside him, and passes him the clothes. The rain has stopped, but he’s still wet - streaks of water down his face and back, dripping from hair that has regained some of its original color. She can’t be sure if the liquid is from the pool, or part of him.

His thumb rubs over the embroidered X on the shirt. “What’s your name?”

“You should put those on. It’s cold.” Ororo does him the favor of looking away, concentrating instead on her boots, and how she can pull them off.

Beside her, he carefully gets to his feet, as if unsure that his legs will really work. He pulls on the pants, and zips up the sweater as she levers a boot off and empties it into the pool. They’ll have to clean it out tomorrow anyway. It’ll be a good exercise for the older students.

“Thank you,” he says when he sits down again, bare toes breaking the surface of the water. His fingers are cool and damp when they touch hers, lying against the dimpled edge of the pool. “Thank you for staying with me.”

She abruptly squeezes his hand, and means to let go, but keeps on holding it. He’s solid. He’s _real_. She can feel the bones, the tendons, the way his skin is getting warmer next to hers. “What happened?” she asks. “You…”

“I drowned,” he says, and stares out across the swimming pool as if he is staring out to sea. He gives her a quick, almost shy, glance. “At least, that’s what it felt like… That’s what it felt like the first time, too. It’s horrifying, realizing you can’t breathe. Maybe even more so when you realise you don’t have to.” He smiles a little sadly. “Is this what it’s like… being a mutant?”

“You’re not a mutant,” Ororo replies. “At least, not like me. I was born with my genetic code. Magneto did this to you. He changed you. He was going to change the world leaders on Ellis Island too. We thought you died. We thought he was going to kill them.”

He closes his eyes. “Is he dead?”

Ororo wonders if it’s hope she can sense in his tone. “He’ll be seeing a jail cell for the rest of his life.”

“How can anything hold him?”

“They’ll find a way,” Ororo says. “And if they don’t, we will.”

He’s silent for a moment, and then he sighs, running the fingers of one hand through damp hair. “Would you have stopped him?” he asks. “Would you have stopped him if you knew I was alive? That his machine doesn’t kill?”

“Yes,” she says, and lets his hand go as he pulls his feet out of the water, hugging his knees to his chest. “Trying to change people in that way is wrong. It’s as bad as trying to make gay people straight, or white people black. Maybe things would be easier for me if everyone in the world was exactly like I am, but the world wouldn’t be a very interesting place.”

He’s shivering again, and she puts a hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to go inside?”

“You… You can’t change me back, can you?” Ororo can’t tell if desperation or resignation has won out in his mind.

“I’m not a doctor,” she says softly. “But I don’t think anyone knows how.”

He swallows, and she wonders if any of the water on his face is from tears. “So what do you do? Fight crime?”

Ororo laughs, and gets to her feet, lifting her boots. “Here,” she says, offering him her free hand.

When he takes it, a little tentatively, and pulls himself up, she wraps her arm around him, and flies. It’s only for a moment – a hop up to her balcony – but he looks down at the distance, stunned.

“How is that possible?” He looks her over with suspicious eyes, like a boy looking for the key to a magic trick.

Ororo smiles, and pushes open the doors to her apartment. “In the village where I grew up, they thought I was a weather goddess who brought them rain.”

“Sounds like Kansas,” he mutters, and something must occur to him, because he meets her eyes again. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

“Ororo,” she says, and spells it for him. She nudges her head towards the open doors. “Come in. You think you can… hold everything together?”

He frowns. “I don’t know. This is all very new.” But he walks in past her anyway, and but for the rain he seems normal. Human. More human than he had ever seemed on television, with those stern glasses and harsh suits.

“Can I get you something?” Ororo asks, trying to be a good hostess even though she suspects the only food nearby is a packet of animal crackers. But he’s stopped, staring at the myriad display of plants in front of them.

“This is… beautiful,” he says, and he sounds puzzled.

She walks past him, and pats his arm. “A little piece of home. I had to bring them inside. It’s getting too cold again. I think New York makes them depressed.”

“New York could make anyone depressed.” He smiles, suddenly, and she finds herself smiling back. “Some water would be great. And aspirin, I guess, but I don’t know if it’ll do much good.”

Ororo goes to her sink. “Maybe I should get Jean to take a look at you.”

“No, I think it’s just eye strain.” He seems to find it funny. “I got zapped with radiation, fell from a cliff, drowned _twice_ , and the only reason I’m in pain is that I don’t have my glasses.”

When she comes back with a glass of reasonably cool tap water, she finds him examining the crimson flowers of one of her larger plants, a petal between his fingertips. “You cultivate plants? That’s your job?”

“I’m a teacher,” she says as he takes the glass. “History. Political science.”

“Oh. I’d be a terrible student. Politicians are all troublemakers looking for the limelight.”

“Some people try to do good.”

“Yes. _Try_.” His tone is bitter, and as he drinks the water she can see the color of his eyes beginning to blur. “They killed my friend. They did this to me. I was trying to protect people.”

“You were scaring the _shit_ out of people,” she says, much more sharply than she had intended. “ _Good_ people. People with husbands and wives and families and jobs and health insurance who’ve never done anyone any harm. You’re more dangerous than them! You’ve always been. How would you feel if we went to the press now and told the world you’re one of those crazy mutants? Would you feel safer?”

His eyes are still fractured, and she wonders if he knows. “That’s personal.”

Ororo nods. “Exactly.”

“But I’ve never tried to kill anyone,” and the glass slips from his hand as he falls to his knees, struggling for breath, coughing up water.

She falls with him, catching hold of him, praying that he’ll remain solid, that he won’t simply dissolve in her arms. There are thick veins like leeches standing out on his skin where she can see it, the clothes she had given him are soaking wet. “Robert,” she says. “Stay with me. You can do it. Don’t let it happen again.”

“I don’t know how,” he says, and somehow she understands it as an apology.

His eyes flood with water as he screams, more in frustration than in pain. And then he’s gone, quicker than before, skin turning translucent and wet and cold under her touch, until after a few moments there’s nothing there at all.

Ororo sits, helplessly holding his soaked sweatshirt, unable to think of what she could possibly do. He had come back before… She had been so sure that he had died. And yet she had just had a moral argument with a dead man. But for the clothes, she might even convince herself that she had been debating with shadows, haunted by the man she had killed, and the man she had watched die.

As she rubs the wet fabric between her fingers, she can feel it drying out – marginally at first, and then, suddenly, the moisture is sucked away. He reconstitutes himself from water vapor, from the droplets on the floor, from the specks on her hands, appearing white and naked on the floor in front of her, eyes open and staring at nothing. His body reminds her of a mannequin, too smooth and colorless to be real.

Ororo reaches out to touch his arm. “Robert?”

He shivers like he’s having a seizure: hundreds of muscles remembering how to work. He turns his head without moving his eyes, and then they too blink into life. “I need a drink,” he says, and she laughs.

She hugs him, and it feels right.

***

“I like your hair,” he says, cradling a hot mug in his hands, blanket around his shoulders as he sits on her couch and tries to stop shivering.

She’s changed out of her wet uniform into more regular clothes – jeans and another of the X-branded shirts – and is tying her hair back as he watches her. Something in her wants to be annoyed at the comment. Something else wants to blush. “It’s dyed,” she says shortly, pretending that he’d asked the question.

Maybe he senses her irritation, because he looks away. It’s so difficult to get a reading on him. Without his glasses, without his senatorial office staring her in the face, he seems so much like the kids she counsels on a daily basis: John Allerdyce, scared and drenched and still angrily defiant; Peter Rasputin, not speaking a word of English, but patiently trying to understand.

“I thought maybe it was a mutant thing.”

Ororo wonders how he would cope with some of the stranger-looking mutations, and then remembers that he’s already met Mystique, Sabertooth, and Toad. The Senator is getting quite an education. “No, not this time. Just felt like doing something different.”

He nods. “Me too. I mean, I dye my hair. Wasn’t really ready to go grey.” His fingers search out the pale strands on his head. “Not that it makes any difference now. I don’t… I don’t understand how this works. How can I be water? What happens to the rest of me? How can I think and remember… How can I be _me_ if I’m just water?”

Ororo sits down beside him on the couch. “Do you believe that you have a soul?”

“I’m not sure.” He grins a little guiltily. “Lapsed Catholic. I don’t really go in for the metaphysics.”

“I told you that the people where I’m from thought I was a goddess. I didn’t believe that, but I knew what I could do. There had to be some kind of explanation. Meeting the Professor and finding out about mutants was part of that, but we’re still not really sure how I can do what I do. In some ways, saying I’m a weather goddess is still the best explanation.”

“So I have to live with having a soul?” He sips on the hot water she’d given him. “How long did it take you, to figure out how to use your… your powers?”

Ororo laughs. “Well, in the beginning the only thing I could do was make it rain, and sometimes I couldn’t make it stop. But after a while I found I could do other things. It’s almost like puberty for regular kids. It can be really scary – all of a sudden you don’t know your own body. But soon you get to like it. You get to find your own identity.”

It’s the speech she gives to all the new kids. She’s never had to give it to a middle-aged man before. “I think I’d like my old identity back,” he says. “I don’t know how I can live like this.”

“People do it all the time,” Ororo responds, and curls her legs up on the couch. “We’re always redefining who we are. You fall in love. You have kids. You get a new job. You change your beliefs. You really think you’re the same person you were when you were twenty?”

He puts his mug down. “I suppose you’re right.” He leans against the back of the couch, and turns to look at her. “I’ve got a daughter. Beth. She’s eight. She’s everything to me. And I don’t know how I can tell her something like this.”

“Are you married?”

“Hmmm, yes.” He absently rubs the finger where a wedding ring might once have been. “We… We both love our daughter very much.”

Ororo takes his hand. It feels familiar, now. “She’ll understand. Maybe not right away, but she will.”

“Do you have family?” he asks.

There’s an ache in the pit of her stomach. “Not yet,” she says, and smiles. “Dating’s a little difficult. Most of the men I know are like my brothers. And it’s hard to tell a guy in a club I’m a mutant. I’m proud of who I am, but sometimes the way they look at you…”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “If I’ve caused any of that.”

She nods. “You have. But I think you’ll know better in the future.”

His mouth is eerily cool when she kisses him, his lips dry. When she takes him to bed, he is hot, and real, and everything she needs.

The storm rattles the windowpanes.


End file.
